Anxiety and depression were hitting pretty hard earlier, so I thought what could possibly be better for my mental state than a crime thriller? Yes, I decided to polish off what I had left of Root Film, and remarkably, despite a few tears during the end credits (if you know, you know) I came out of the whole thing feeling a bit better about everything.

I'm glad Root Film turned out so well. Root Letter was a vastly underappreciated visual novel/adventure hybrid modelled after late '90s Japanese PC games in structure, and while Root Film leans a bit harder on the visual novel side of things, it still has enough classic adventure DNA in it to make it feel like a distinct experience.

I'm a particular fan of the "Max Mode" confrontations that tend to form the conclusions to the main parts of the story. These are, quite simply, situations where you need to present the right pieces of evidence at the right time to get the full story out of a witness (or suspect) but the way they're presented with such flair and drama is exactly the sort of thing I live for in video games. They're very different from Root Letter's take on "Max Mode", but they work just as well as a means of bookending the major "cases" — or at least major breakthroughs in the cases.

As someone who is generally terrible at figuring out mysteries ahead of time, Root Film kept me guessing most of the way through, though I did notice a few things before the cast did. I actually got one particular core mystery "right" early on, but from the wrong angle; to say any more would be a spoiler, so I will refrain from doing so.

All in all, I really loved it. It's a shame there aren't multiple endings like there were in Root Letter, but the structure of the game didn't really lend itself to having alternative conclusions; plus there's an argument to be made for the game's following of a linear path being for legitimate artistic reasons. Again, to talk too much about exactly why would spoil things from the late game so, again, I will refrain.

Now I need to figure out what visual novel to get underway next! Piofiore arrived today (which my wife immediately dubbed "Contains Men with Hats") so I'm curious about that, but I also have a heap of other titles on my shelves… plus I never finished off all the routes in Nurse Love Syndrome either.

For now, sleep is probably the correct answer, but I'll make a decision on that front tomorrow!

Finally followed through on something I've been meaning to do for ages today: I ordered a bunch of otome games with the intention of… well, something. At the very least playing all of them and, time permitting, writing something about them somewhere.

I've played a few otome games in the past — Sweet Fuse was my introduction to the genre, as I've explained elsewhere — but I've always been meaning to check out some of the "modern classics" that have come west. With the excitement over the upcoming release of BUSTAFELLOWS (the devs get genuinely upset if you don't write it in all capitals) I thought it was high time I put my money where my mouth is, support these games that we need to see more of over here, and now I'm looking forward to some quality narrative action.

Specifically, to begin with, I've picked up Collar x Malice, Code: Realize and Piofiore, all of which I've heard good things about. I also have London Detective Mysteria on my shelf from a while back, and it's entirely possible I have some others hoarded from a while back, too.

Aside from the BUSTAFELLOWS hype, the other thing which convinced me that now might be a good time to do this is that I'm coming towards the end of Root Film, and it's been really enjoyable to have a mystery story to enjoy before bed. I talked a while back about visual novels as bedtime reading and for one reason or another I fell a bit off that — but I'm going to make it a thing again.

Root Film is more adventure game than visual novel, but it's still a narrative-centric experience, and the way it's presented makes it a very good "bedtime game". Plus I think Andie has been enjoying what she's seen of it too, which is always a bonus.

Root Film is great, incidentally, if you hadn't picked up on that already. It's very much worth your time, as is its predecessor Root Letter. Both of them seem destined for relative obscurity, but everyone I know who has played them loved them — including me. So if you're after a solid mystery or two to solve, add 'em to your collection when you have a chance. Do it for Magari.

Started playing Hades today. I'm late to the party, I know, but I'd been waiting for the inevitable physical release, and now that's a thing. Even better, it seems that the physical release is a completely up to date version that didn't require any additional downloads. Lovely.

I'm actually thinking this might be a good approach to physical releases in the future. Release the game on its release date digitally so people who want to play it immediately can do so, then how back the physical release until all the DLC and patches are done. Voila, preservation problem solved.

Anyway! Hades is very good. I'm sure you know this already as it was one of the most well regarded games of last year. But I can indeed confirm it is good.

One of the things I've been impressed with is the humour. I was concerned it was going to be slightly insufferable ironic Western humour, but thankfully that is not the case. It's a wry look at Greek mythology, yes, but it's respectful and never feels cynical. It does a great deal to humanise a lot of the divine figures involved along the way, making them all very likeable for different reasons.

I really like the game structure too. Battling your way through a series of discrete self-contained combat encounters works really well, and distinguished the game from Diablo wannabes. The lack of XP grinding and equippable loot helps with this, too; it keeps the game pacy and fun.

I played for a couple of hours earlier and am looking forward to trying more. I'm sure I'll have more to say when I've spent some more time with it!

Another week gone by, and another month pretty much gone by, too. Time seems to be flying oddly quickly right now — perhaps it's because I'm actually enjoying the things I'm doing on a day-to-day basis. I am finally starting to feel a bit "trapped" in the house after many, many months of "yeah, this is all right, really" but it's nothing I can't really cope with, and it's not as if I have nothing to occupy myself while I'm here anyway.

Did everyone see the "Evercade VS" teaser earlier? More details are coming next month on the 23rd but it's been fun to see the excitement and speculation over it so far. It looks like it's going to be a good year for retro gaming!

And that got me thinking, earlier. At the other end of the gaming spectrum, what on Earth happened to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X? I've heard pretty much nothing about either ever since they launched. Well, that's a lie, Xbox Series X owners can't shut up about Game Pass (and some were even trying to argue it was the solution to the preservation issue the other day, which is just too ridiculous a prospect to even attempt to argue against) but PlayStation 5? I've seen no hype or excitement for anything whatsoever.

I suspect both Microsoft and Sony are feeling like they may have rushed the two consoles out somewhat hastily in order to cater to a market that wasn't really there — and, I guess, a developer and publisher community that isn't really there, either. And the continued shortage of both parts and assembled consoles isn't helping matters, either; in some places I know it's still hard to get hold of one of the new systems.

The only thing on PS5 that has piqued my interest even slightly is Neptunia ReVerse, but I'm already behind on Neptunia games so I can wait a little while to play another remake of the first one. Most of the developers I'm personally interested in seem to favour the Switch — and the Switch seems to be the place to go for limited-run stuff, as well, with some limited-press houses doing exclusively Switch stuff, and a lot of the most interesting stuff either having a Switch option at the very least, or in many cases being a Switch-only affair. Things have changed a lot since Limited Run Games first started doing this!

Anyway, those are the fairly unstructured thoughts that have been on my mind today. I'm having a nice quiet weekend with Atelier Shallie and Root Film this weekend as I've already got next week's videos prepped and ready to go. Even better, my wife has finished upgrading our toilet so the house no longer resembles a war zone and we can poo in comfort. Always a bonus.

Anyway, I hope you've all had a good week and have a pleasant, relaxing weekend to look forward to.

I think I've figured out why jumpcuts on YouTube videos bother me so much — aside from them just being shit editing. It's because they completely destroy the normal form of speech and turn anything someone is saying into a relentless, endless string of words with no real beginning and no real end.

To put it another way, it turns an entire 20-minute YouTube video into a single sentence. Aside from just being a bit crap, this bothers me specifically because it hits my autistic brain right in a place where it hurts: I get incredibly anxious if I feel like someone is just talking "at" me and not giving me a place to say anything.

While I'm obviously not expected to "reply" to a YouTube video, the relentless, never-ending pace of someone jumpcutting every single breath out of their video creates exactly the same feeling of anxiety in me as if I'm speaking to someone who won't let me get a word in edgeways. I hate it. It's actively unpleasant to be around.

Aside from that, I just really don't see the point. It makes the people who do it less likeable and less "human". It looks terrible to see people flicking around from position to position. It looks absolutely ridiculous when they do it in the middle of a sentence — and yes, people do indeed do this. And surely, from a practical perspective, it must make a ridiculous amount of additional work to edit — unless these people have some sort of magic automatic jumpcutting software or whatever. Which is probably not beyond the realm of possibility.

Regardless of the reasoning behind it, you won't catch me jumpcutting, and you will find me actively avoiding video creators who make excessive use of it. Thankfully the few channels I do actively follow steer clear of this sort of thing — perhaps because most of the people I follow are closer to my age and older.

Grumble, grumble, somethingsomething TikTok generation, get off my lawn you little shits.

Got around to making a start on Atelier Shallie this evening, and so far I'm very impressed. Obviously I'll talk a lot more about it in the coming weeks as I cover it in the Atelier MegaFeature on MoeGamer, but first impressions are very positive indeed.

The thing that has struck me more than anything else is how much it feels like a new Atelier Iris game in terms of structure and mechanics. A whole ton of Atelier Iris' best bits have been brought back for Shallie, including the Burst meter, the ability to stun (or "break", as it's known here) enemies and a structure built around earning enough points to progress to the next main narrative beat.

The latter aspect looks to be one of the more interesting parts of the game, as it's dynamic and responsive… kind of. Ostensibly it presents you with objectives to accomplish according to how you've been behaving in the game — have lots of fights, you'll get more combat-related objectives, that sort of thing — but realistically it's a matter of "do this thing a certain number of times and then a specific objective will come up". It's still cool, though, and means that the game feels less like working through a checklist and more like being rewarded for doing the stuff that you're doing anyway.

The main reason people outside the Atelier fandom take an interest in Shallie is the fact that it lacks a time limit. In fact, it appears to completely lack a date and time system altogether — which is fine, because without a time limit, it would feel a bit redundant. Instead, you can take all the time you want to explore, gather materials, fight monsters and interact with your friends — which is great. Personally I have no problem with the time-limited Atelier games, but it's nice to have a change in format, particularly after how most of Atelier Escha & Logy was fairly rigidly structured.

Atelier Shallie also marks a shift to what I assume is the "modern modern Atelier style" of presentation, where rather than exploring dungeons from fixed camera angles, you instead have an over-the-shoulder view, coupled with larger fields whose maps you can't see in their entirety initially. This is very similar to what Atelier Lulua would go on to do in 2019, so I wouldn't be surprised if all the games in between Shallie and Lulua follow a similar means of doing things. I'll have to wait and see, I guess!

In fact, a fair amount of Atelier Shallie feels quite a bit like Atelier Lulua. I'm pretty sure one of the main characters did what I have known up until this point as Lulua's iconic "salute" animation; I suspect it's only a matter of time before at least one person does the nervous "finger circles" animation, which is adorable.

It's great to see how many previous Dusk characters return in Shallie. So far I've only run into Linca, but if the intro video is anything to go by I'm expecting to see Ayesha, Escha and Logy at the very least, and I suspect there will be others too; it just wouldn't be a Dusk game without Wilbell, after all.

Anyway, after an hour or two of play earlier I'm having a good time and I'm looking forward to writing about it. There'll be an article on Escha & Logy's music this week, then the first Shallie article will follow the week after.

We're getting there!

Over the last… year or so I guess? I've started to get a lot more people randomly showing up in the comments of my videos on YouTube — and of those commenters being the original creators of the games I cover. Most recently I had Simon Hunt, author of Diamonds and Dan Strikes Back, show up, and previously I've had one of the authors of Time Bandit for Atari ST, someone behind an Atari User listing and probably a couple of others I've forgotten along the way, too.

It's a real delight any time this happens, and any time the Internet threatens to overwhelm you with its rancid, sewage-filled nature, it's worth remembering that the same tech that allows 12-year olds to go "on god my oomf fixed this pedo's art /gen" and inexplicably be taken seriously by someone also allows people to connect in ways that we would have never dreamed possible a decade or two back.

When I was first playing Diamonds on my Atari 8-bit, I loved it, but I never would have imagined that one day its creator would be sending me a message saying how nice it was to see me enjoying his game many years after its original release — and indeed admitting that he was never very good at his own game in the case of Dan Strikes Back.

That's pretty awesome. And, as I say, as sites like Twitter slip deeper and deeper into a foul-smelling, rancid trash fire, it's worth remembering that the Internet is a much, much bigger place than social media might make it seem sometimes. In fact, as time goes on, it's feeling more and more like social media is just that weird side of town where the general public inexplicably seems to enjoy hanging out, even though it's a complete shithole. As in real life, the real value is in curating smaller, more specialist communities and enjoying the company of people who aren't blithering idiots.

To put it another way, I'd much rather be hanging out at the local Atari users' group than standing on a street corner smoking and drinking Special Brew until I vomit in the gutter.

You know the bit in Transformers the Movie where they're in that "court" and there's the big rotating head thing that growls "guilty" or "innocent", then drops people in the pit of death if they're innocent? That's Twitter, and it fucking sucks.

Those of you who have been following me for a while will be well aware of my longstanding frustration with social media, and particularly its tendency towards public shaming. This has been a thing for a long time now. In fact, I vividly recall having a fair few arguments with people I knew who were inexplicably in favour of it in probably about 2012-2013 or so — I'm not friends with them any more, thankfully — and it's only gotten worse as the years have rolled on.

The recent fiasco with Dan from Game Grumps should be the last straw for a lot of people. In the space of literally about half an hour, we had a Reddit post (which, it turns out, contained fabricated or at the very least misattributed evidence) talking about Dan sleeping with a groupie a few years back, and this escalated via Twitter into "Dan is grooming minors and is a paedophile". And I'm not exaggerating; it really was in the space of half an hour that all this happened.

Thankfully, in this instance it's gone away almost as quickly as it erupted, partly because the original instigator of the situation stepped up and basically said "whoops, I didn't mean this to happen" (yes you fucking did) but if Dan has any sense, he'll sue the fuck out of the little shit who started this whole thing off.

I feel strongly about this sort of thing because I've been on the receiving end of it. In the grand scheme of things, I'm pretty much an Internet nobody in comparison to someone like Dan. But I've still suffered the consequences of a band of trolls latching on to something I said (in this instance, the fact that I said I enjoyed My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic) and then using that as an excuse to kick off a coordinated harassment campaign.

And I mean harassment. I'm not talking a few mean tweets. I'm talking spreading my name around accusing me of being a paedophile. I'm talking phoning my family members and people I worked with at the time to make horrible accusations. I'm talking stalking me on every social media account I had. In my case, I hadn't even done anything even vaguely "wrong"; I was just a target for some bored losers online who wanted to try and ruin someone's life.

The difference with the Dan situation is, of course, that when you're someone of at least a reasonable amount of note online, these sort of accusations can potentially destroy your career. We saw it happen with ProJared — who thankfully bounced back after comprehensively tearing down pretty much everything that was thrown at him — and thankfully, this whole incident this time around has ended before it really got rolling.

It saddens me a bit that I've seen people I know participating in the whole thing this time around. I'm really disgusted with how quickly people went for blood, and I can't help but worry about the fact this keeps happening. Ultimately it ends up being bad for the people who are the real victims of actual wrongdoing — because eventually, no-one will believe them.

One of the things that people seem most hesitant to do these days is to make their own mind up about things — particularly when it comes to opinions on popular media.

To simplify the model, some people find themselves in the role of "opinion leaders", and people who follow those opinion leaders take said opinion leaders' opinions at face value without taking the time to think critically for themselves.

This has, to an extent, always been an issue in one form or another. I vividly remember back in the '80s and early '90s taking the word of magazine reviewers as absolute gospel, for example, and yet in more recent years I've come to the conclusion that modern video game reviews are, for the most part, completely and utterly useless to me.

The reason I'm bringing this up now is that I've just finished a recording session for Atari A to Z. One of the games I was covering was, supposedly, a hot pile of garbage that had no redeeming value whatsoever — at least, if the reviews both at the time of its original release and a little later (early 2000s) were to be believed.

But then I played it… and while it had its limitations — it was still an Atari 2600 game, after all — there was actually a lot to like about it. And I'd go so far as to say that calling it "bad" would be doing it a massive injustice. You might not like it, you might find it boring or you might simply find it unappealing, sure… but from a technical standpoint, this game was pretty much flawless.

And herein lies the problem we've always had with video game criticism specifically: the fact that the "opinion leaders" (or wannabe opinion leaders) out there are still obsessed with making judgements of "quality" on something that is fundamentally subjective. Bad games absolutely do exist, sure… but there's a limit to what you can reasonably call "bad" before you're crossing over into "I just don't like this" territory. Which is quite a different territory, let me tell you.

Anyway. It's always a pleasant surprise when I cover something I'd been led to believe would be a pile of old toss, and it actually turns out to be rather enjoyable. You can find out what it is in a couple of weeks' time on Atari A to Z Flashback!

Reading these old Atari magazines is interesting for a variety of reasons, but one that continually stands out to me is how different today's hardware is… and not necessarily in a good way!

This evening, for example, I was looking for a way to reassign the function keys on my wireless keyboard. It's a Logitech keyboard I've had for a few years at this point, but I've hit the "why did no-one think this was a terrible idea" turn-off-your-PC button accidentally too many times to want to keep going as is. (Patti also hit it once during a work meeting. Thank heavens for the quick startup time of SSDs is all I can say!)

Eventually, I came across the apparent solution: download an application called Logitech Options, which allows you to change the settings for your wireless Logitech devices. I downloaded it, and was surprised to discover it was two hundred megabytes in size. This is obviously small fry to today's lightning-fast broadband speeds to download, but why on earth is a piece of software designed to change a few settings two hundred megabytes?

Even as (relatively) recently as the Windows 95/98 era, software that Made Things Happen with hardware could fit on a single 1.44MB disk, often with some bonus goodies thrown in there too — and if you look back to the systems being covered in the issues of Monitor and Page 6 that I've been reading recently, you're dealing with computers that had 1MB of RAM at the absolute most — more commonly somewhere between 48K and 512K depending on if it was an 8- or 16-bit machine.

What's amusing to me, given the ridiculous size of that Logitech Options application (which didn't even do what I wanted in the end — it would only let me swap my two mouse buttons over and nothing else) is that back in those early 8-bit days in particular, programmers were absolute masters of cramming useful things into tiny amounts of memory. It wasn't at all uncommon to see type-in listings act as programs that you would run then keep in the computer's memory while you were doing other things — and on all but the most low-end machines you'd be able to do everything you normally would with the computer with this little extra bit of software sitting somewhere in your 64K (or whatever) of RAM.

A good example is the "TYPO" software pioneered by (if I remember rightly) Antic magazine, which was subsequently also used by Page 6 here in the UK. TYPO was, as the name suggests, a program to help ensure that you were typing things in correctly — in this case while typing in program listings in BASIC from magazines. You'd load and run TYPO and it would sit in memory, then as you typed it would flash up letter codes at the top of the screen when you finished writing a line. If the two-character code matched the one printed in the magazine, you'd typed it in right. If it didn't, you needed to check it. Simple. Effective. Took up so little memory you could type in a full BASIC listing with it resident and be able to run the program flawlessly afterwards.

Two hundred megabytes for an application that lets me swap my mouse buttons over? What, exactly, happened?